C-ODO: an OWL Meta-model for Collaborative Ontology Design

The design and maintenance of ontologies is a complex social collaborative activity, and this is true especially for semantic-web ontologies. On the one hand, such activity calls for the availability of tools providing support to typical operations such as the reuse of existing ontologies and design patterns, the re-engineering of thesauri, lexicons, folksonomies, database schemas, and knowledge from corpora, or to the appropriate evaluation and selection processes which are needed in order to make an ontology functional to a given task. On the other hand, tools able to support the collaborative performance of all these operations, aiding e.g. the discussion and consensus-reaching processes on an ontology element and its rationale, should be provided too. Current tools substantially fail to address both types of need. In our opinion, this is partly due to the lack of both an adequate requirement analysis, which describes the actual processes and data that are usually managed during on...